Canadian Government Owned Power Co.

In 2009 the company was facing a Big Data challenge – how to optimally manage some 600 000 MRO materials and services across multiple ERP systems and 75 locations.

Key facts:

13 000 Employees

75 Power Stations

Canadian Crown Corporation

Live with Refresh since 2009

600 000 SKU's in scope

ERP systems: Passport, SAP, IBM Maximo

Business Challenge

In 2009 the company was facing a challenge – how to optimally manage some 600 000 MRO materials and services across multiple ERP systems and 75 locations. An in-house strategic P2P (procure to pay) initiative aimed to identify and categorize most materials and services procurement lines using the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code (UNSPSC). UNSPSC was to be mapped to each of the 600 000 Materials and Services and then updated in Passport, Maximo and SAP to facilitate:

• consistent, accurate and uniform tracking of company spend across all company divisions, suppliers and systems;

• easy company-wide visibility of all items, MRO in particular;

• cost effective strategic procurement optimization;

• full utilization of electronic commerce capabilities; and

• the further development of strategies, benchmarks & analytics for strategic sourcing & due diligence (e.g. spend by item, spend by vendor, spend by category).

The main initial challenge was: how best to correctly and consistently manage 600 000 materials and services by assigning UNSPSC codes for each, across all 75 sites? A detailed public RFQ was issued seeking software including automating this UNSPSC assignment by:

• Extracting the data from Passport, Maximo & SAP;

• Automatically mapping existing codes to UNSPSC codes;

• Cleansing the data and removing duplicates;

• Suggesting alternate codes if there is no exact match; and

• Validating the data before uploading the codes.

After detailed comparison of the software and services vendors in the Cataloguing / Data Quality space (including sample cleansing of thousands of real MRO materials), Refresh™ from Fresh International was selected for the job.

The Solution

Refresh Desktop was deployed within one week of purchase so the assignment of classifications could start quickly. Technically, the local project team did a fantastic job adding Refresh as a virtual app to all network users as well as providing valuable feedback to Fresh International to rapidly deliver a customized Refresh layout for quickly matching multiple variable UNSPSC’s.

But the most impressive job was done by the local project team and the business users in the actual assignment of the correct UNSPSC code for each ERP material. The bulk of this material matching job was completed in record time by sharing out the work and using the automating functions inside Refresh, particularly the shared custom dictionary.

The assistance from Fresh has been awesome… this will bode well when we start looking at any future cataloguing software.

Supply Chain Projects Delivery Lead

Canadian Government Power Co.

We went live last week, loading all the matched data from Refresh into all ERPs. Our users are actually finding that they have a better result searching and selecting the new SAP UNSPSC material groups

Supply Chain Projects Delivery Lead

Canadian Government Power Co.

The team has managed to complete the analysis and re-matching of almost 500'000 material masters in just over 10 days. AWESOME effort